


lay them down

by lincesque



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, Gen, Guardian Angels, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-08
Updated: 2012-12-08
Packaged: 2017-11-20 14:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/586483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lincesque/pseuds/lincesque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q first meets his guardian angel when he’s six.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lay them down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [minacaeks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/minacaeks/gifts).



> I still owe Mina the sequel to the [double-oh catastrophe fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/574608) and it's not really wanting to be written.
> 
> So um, have some nonsensical guardian angel fluff? ILU bb ♥
> 
> It's more or less gen unless you really want to squint but IDK. Everything I write is written with 00Q in mind. So um. Yes =Db
> 
> Title taken from Jason Walker's lovely song [Hope You Found It Now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tywt2QFmGOw)
> 
> [Edit: Entire story expanded completely into one full chapter because small chapters make me sad adfhoasdfj. Sob.]
> 
> [Edit x 2: Now has a kind of AU scene with Q and 007 in Q branch, [talking about weapons](http://tumbloncat.tumblr.com/post/37470916628/kind-of-like-an-au-snippet-to-my-guardian). IDEK.]

It starts like this.

Q first meets his guardian angel when he’s six.  
  
He crawls out of bed one morning and there’s a strange man leaning against his window, blocking the light that usually spills over his floors and his bed.  
  
“Who are you?” Q asks through a yawn, still rubbing sleep from his eyes.  
  
The man stills and looks directly at Q.

“You can see me?” he asks and he sounds surprised, even a little cautious.  
  
Q blinks at him slowly before reaching over and poking him in the leg. “Obviously. You’re right there.”  
  
Something occurs to Q as he sees the hint of shadow at the man’s back. He’s smarter than all the rest of the children in his class, some of his teachers as well, so he puts two and two together and comes up with four.  
  
“Are you my guardian angel?” Q breathes, eyes widening.  
  
The strange man stares at him for a few long moments before he pushes away from the wall with a muttered comment that sounds like ‘dear lord’. He drops to one knee before Q and lets a hand settle on the top of Q’s hair, ruffling it gently.  
  
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” he tells Q, “but as you understand it, yes, I am your guardian angel.”  
  
Q stares at his angel, at his short silver-blonde hair and his ice blue eyes, and he smiles. “Mine?”  
  
His angel stares right back, a strange expression crossing over his features for a brief moment before he nods. “I’ll be back later, okay?” he tells Q as he stands, stepping back. “Let’s just keep this as a secret between us for now.”  
  
Q scrambles forward when the man, his guardian angel, turns to go. He grabs his hand. “Wait!”  
  
His angel looks down at their hands, Q’s tiny fingers clutching his much bigger ones, and then at Q. “What?”  
  
“Your name,” Q mumbles, feeling embarrassed for no good reason at all, and tightens his grip on his angel’s hand. “Can you tell me your name?”  
  
His angel’s smile is beautiful, Q thinks in awe.  
  
“We don’t get names, only numbers,” his angel tells him. “But you can call me 007.”  
  
Then he gently untangles his fingers from Q’s and between one blink and the next, he’s gone, leaving Q only with the impression of huge black wings spread over the pale cream walls of his bedroom.

 

*

  
  
He’s fourteen when he next sees 007.  
  
Again, he wakes up in the morning and his angel is there, sitting cross legged in a chair across from the bed.  
  
The machines at his bedside detail his heartbeat, his blood pressure. Q watches the jumping lines of his electrocardiogram for several heartbeats before he turns to look at 007.  
  
“Haven’t seen you for a while,” his whispers, voice dry and cracking.  
  
“I’ve been around,” 007 answers offhandedly, producing a cup filled with ice chips from somewhere and helps Q sit up enough so that he can swallow a few.  
  
The ice slides cool and welcome down his burning throat.  
  
“I guess I have you to thank for this, right?” Q gestures at his prone body, chest and leg bandaged, one arm in a plaster cast.  
  
007 winces almost imperceptibly. “No one else can see me and I’m not allowed to actively intervene.” The words sound almost like an apology despite the flat tone.  
  
Q shakes his head once and then stops immediately as the world seems to start spinning around him, making him nauseous.  
  
“I didn’t mean it to sound like that,” he forces out a moment later, trying not to be sick all over his blankets. “I meant to say thank you. You saved my life.”  
  
007 lowers him back to the bed and touches a hand, blessedly cold against his burning skin, against Q’s brow. “It’s my job to keep you alive,” he mutters, obviously unused to gratitude or sick humans or maybe both.  
  
Q huffs a laugh that turns into a grimace when his ribs protest, painfully. 007 slides his other hand under the sheets and lets his fingers brush against Q’s side for a brief instant. All of the tiny aches and pains suddenly vanish and Q glances at his guardian angel who doesn’t quite meet his gaze.  
  
“It’s the least I can do,” 007 says and if Q didn’t know better, he would say that his guardian angel looks a little embarrassed.  
  
Without the pain, Q can feel his eyes closing, almost on their own volition. He’s so tired and he just wants to nap for a moment.  
  
“I’m always here,” 007 murmurs, voice low, almost soothing, one cool hand still on Q’s forehead. “Even if you can’t see me.”  
  
Q sleeps and dreams of flying through the sky.

  
  
*

  
  
“Are you really going to make it so that we only ever see each other once every eight years?” Q asks, pulling on his trousers the day after his twenty second birthday. “If so, it’s turning into some ridiculous star-crossed love story.”  
  
The words are addressed to his guardian angel, who is sprawled in the armchair next to Q’s shelf of books when Q walks back into his bedroom after completing his morning routine in the bathroom.  
  
007 glances up from where he’s halfway through Tolstoy’s War and Peace in its original Russian form and raises an eyebrow.  
  
“You do realise that you’re not supposed to see me at all, right?” he asks, sliding something into the book, marking his page, before standing to push it back onto the bookshelf, slotting it back to the exact place he found it.  
  
“I’ve always been the exception to the rule,” Q says, waving it off with one hand, head buried in his closest, searching for a decent shirt and clean sweater.  
  
When he turns back, clothing in hand, Q finds 007 a little too close to him. He clutches the shirt and sweater to his chest. “Jesus! You’re going to give me a heartattack.”  
  
“You shouldn’t use that name in vain,” 007 tells him, but he steps back and for one brief moment, Q sees the shadow cast by his guardian angel’s wings, painted on the floorboards by the sunlight from the window behind him.  
  
“You were the one who said ‘dear lord’ back when I was six,” Q shoots back with a smirk which only grows when 007 stops and turns to him with surprise all over his features.  
  
Q shrugs his shoulders and wanders into the kitchen for breakfast. “I’ve got a good memory.”  
  
007 follows, half a step behind Q. “It’s been sixteen years and you still remember. Most people would’ve forgotten.”  
  
Q busies himself at the stove, throwing some bacon and two eggs into a pan, putting the kettle on. “I’m not most people,” he comments, after a while, when the bread is sliced and in the toaster and his tea leaves sit in his cup, waiting for steaming hot water.  
  
“I’ve noticed,” 007 responds, dryly.  
  
“And well,” Q glances back at his angel for one brief moment before looking away. “It was you who said it.” His voice is very quiet when he admits to the last.  
  
Q fixes his gaze intently at his pan and kettle and almost jumps when a hand finds itself in his hair, messing it into more of a nest of rumpled curls than it already was.  
  
007’s blue eyes are glinting with humor and there’s a tiny curve to his lips that makes his entire face seem ethereal, otherworldly, beautiful. He ruffles Q’s hair more before withdrawing his hand, gaze fond.  
  
“I’ll see you in eight years, Q,” he says with an almost playful tilt to his chin and his voice curls carefully over Q’s name for the first time.  
  
Q’s left standing alone in the tiny kitchen of his tiny flat, staring at the empty place where his guardian angel stood barely seconds before.  
  
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “See you in eight years, 007.”

  
  
*

  
  
Q wakes in excruciating pain and to someone crouched in front of him, calling his name.  
  
“No,” he moans, trying to turn away from the sound. “No, no! Go away.”  
  
“Q,” the person in front of him repeats. “Q! You need to wake up. It’s not safe.”  
  
“That’s an understatement,” Q mutters as he finally opens his eyes and pushes himself up on shaking arms. He’s not particularly surprised to see 007 in front of him, kneeling on the dirty mud floor. A section of Q’s mind notes that the expensive looking suit trousers that 007 wears is unstained, obviously something to do with his magical angel powers.  
  
“Q! Focus,” 007 snaps and Q blinks. It’s the first time he’s heard 007 sound so serious, so angry.  
  
“What happened?” Q asks as he uses the wall to help him stand. 007 hovers at his side, watchful.  
  
“You were kidnapped,” 007 tells him, taking an elbow and helping Q wobble to the other side where the door is. “Right off the street.”  
  
“Oh,” Q says as memories start returning, “I remember that part. Five men crowding me into an alley. Seven in total, counting the one who was already in the alley and knocked me out and the driver of the vehicle that was idling two feet away when everything happened.”  
  
Q leans against the wall, right next to the door and experimentally toggles at the handle. “It’s locked.”  
  
“Indeed,” 007 says and does a complicated looking gesture with his fingers. There’s an audible click of a door unlocking.  
  
“I thought you weren’t supposed to interfere?” Q asks, almost bemused, as 007 opens the door and leans out to have a quick look around.  
  
“Doesn’t matter anymore,” 007 says, slinging Q’s arm around his shoulders and maneuvering him out into the deserted corridor.  
  
Q thinks about this for a few staggering steps. “Aren’t you going to get into trouble?”  
  
“Why can’t you stay out of trouble?” 007 responds, voice sharp, deliberately evading the question. “The MI6? You’re basically asking for it.”  
  
“Maybe I’ve figured that the only time I can see you is if I get myself into deep shit,” Q mutters in between harsh gasps of breath. His left leg refuses to support his weight and the back of his head throbs with pain.  
  
007 stops dead in the middle of the corridor. There’s a troubled look in his eyes and a heavy frown pressed in the creases of his brow. “Are you doing this all because of me?”  
  
Q barks a laugh that he regrets almost immediately as the pounding in his head almost doubles at the loudness of the sound echoing up and down the corridor.  
  
“You think much too highly of yourself, 007,” Q manages to force out before his vision warps around the edges and he’s free falling into darkness.  
  
The last thing he sees is the too vivid blue of his angel’s eyes and the sound of his name on his lips.

  
  
*

  
  
“I’m alive,” Q breathes out, words jumbled by the mask over his nose and mouth and tube down his throat.  
  
“Indeed you are,” a light voice comments from his bedside. “It’s a surprise to everyone including myself. Would you care to explain how you managed to single handedly disable thirty seven armed terrorists and escape from a secure compound with a concussion, three bruised ribs and a broken leg, Quartermaster?”  
  
Q glances over to his bedside and isn't too surprised to see that it's M sitting there, hands folded primly in her lap, eyes unreadable.  
  
“I have no idea, ma’am.” Q finds the remote to his bed and raises himself up several degrees, until he’s almost sitting.  
  
M’s gaze is penetrating and sharp. “Then can you tell us who the other man is?”  
  
Q’s head jerks up. “Other man?” he asks, trying for neutral but feeling his heart pound harder.  
  
“The one caught on camera assisting you from your jail cell and out of the compound. The one who suddenly vanishes between one frame and the next as soon as help was close by.” M stares at him. “Who is he, Q?”  
  
Q holds her gaze. “I was too out of it, ma’am. I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea.”  
  
M watches him for a few extra seconds before she nods, rising from her seat. “Tanner will be by to debrief you tomorrow afternoon. I’ll see you back at HQ soon, Q.”  
  
“Ma’am,” Q murmurs, holding himself up until M closes the door behind her.

  
  
*

  
  
Q stirs from his uneasy, medicated sleep. A quick glance at the clock shows that it’s just past three in the morning and something has woken him up.  
  
“Q.” It’s his guardian angel’s voice.  
  
“007,” Q mumbles, trying to sit up. A hand on his shoulder stops him, pushing him gently back into his nest of pillows.  
  
“What are you doing here?” Q asks, his eyes half open, watching the moving shadow next to his bed, barely outlined by the half hidden moon peeking out from behind a heavy cloud. “It hasn’t been eight years yet.”  
  
007 laughs and it’s a little different than how Q remembers it, but he can’t put his finger on why. Maybe it’s a little more choked, less relaxed, more panicked? He can’t quite say.  
  
“You were right,” 007 says and the comment is a little more than out of left field for Q, who’s on a heavy dose of morphine.  
  
“Back at the compound,” 007 elaborates, obviously realising Q’s confusion. “When you asked if I was going to get into trouble.”  
  
Q inhales and struggles up into a seated position despite the disapproving glare he knows that 007 is giving him right at this moment. “What’s going to happen to you?”  
  
There’s silence and a sharp shock of fear slides down Q’s throat, into his chest and curls uneasily around his heart. “007?”  
  
“I’m sorry, Q,” 007 murmurs and Q feels the displacement of air when he leans down and something light brushes over his ever-messy hair. “I wish I could have stuck around longer.”  
  
Q reaches out blindly and grabs his angel’s sleeve. His fingers slide down until they’re curled around 007’s, just like they had been back when Q was six and scared and so happy that he got to meet his guardian angel for the first time. He’s twenty six now and still just as scared and happy.  
  
“Are you leaving me?” Q asks, voice terribly small.  
  
007 huffs out a breath that brushes over Q’s hair, his cheek. “I interfered, broke one of the cardinal rules of guardianship. I’m not exactly leaving by choice.” His voice is a little tart, as if he was disappointed that Q didn’t understand that.  
  
They stay that way - Q’s fingers tight against 007’s, 007’s cheek brushing the very top of Q’s hair, fingers of his other hand threading through the soft strands on the back of Q’s neck - for one long moment before 007 pushes away and takes a step back.  
  
“Will I see you again?” Q asks, shivering a little at the loss of contact.  
  
“Maybe,” 007 replies and Q sees the huge outline of his wings against the window as the moon spills out from behind cloud cover.  
  
“Goodbye, Q.”

  
  
*

  
  
There’s something empty rattling within Q these days, when he goes to work, when he goes home, when he wakes up in the morning and his eyes always linger over the armchair that 007 last sat in.  
  
He skims his fingers over the books on his bookshelf one day and on a whim, takes down the thick book that 007 had sat in the squishy armchair reading several years ago. The book almost automatically flips open to a page and there’s a black feather sitting pressed against the thin, papery page of cramped black letters.  
  
Q runs his fingers over the feather, feeling a tingle in his fingertips, before he shuts the book and slides it back onto the shelf, feather and all.  
  
It’s been six months and Q knows, somewhere deep inside, that 007 isn’t around anymore. Every new scrape, bruise and cut he gets reminds Q of 007.  
  
Q misses him like a phantom limb. He doesn’t think the ache will ever go away.

  
  
*

  
  
“You have a new agent,” M tells him, the night before he turns thirty.  
  
Q is the only person left in Q branch and M is watching him with an unreadable look in her eyes, Tanner hovering two steps behind her, several files tucked under his arm.  
  
“Oh?” He tries to make himself sound interested but suspects he fails miserably.  
  
M doesn't seem to care, since he has no doubt she notices, but her voice is calm, collected. “Our new double-oh, he’ll need some equipment for a trip to Hong Kong. There’s a sniper we need to get rid of."  
  
Q nods absently as his mind skips over all the double-ohs he knows and stutters to a stop in realisation that there’s only one vacancy left.  
  
“You’ll be meeting him tomorrow,” M says and walks out, Tanner following with a small incline of his head.  
  
Q doesn’t say a word.

 

*

  
It ends like this.  
  
Q walks into the gallery and slides onto the seat next to the only other person that’s there. He deliberately doesn’t think about how that profile looks just a bit too familiar and about how that jaw looks just as stubborn. He doesn't think about blue eyes and smiles hidden behind a facade of stone.  
  
Q doesn’t think about any of those things until the man sitting next to him shifts a little and speaks, voice contemplative, “Eight years, I promised, didn’t I?”  
  
And that's when Q freezes, his eyes widening. He turns to meet ice-blue eyes with a subtle smile lurking within.  
  
“Q,” he says and his skin is both cool and burning where it touches Q’s.  
  
Q can’t help the smile that curves over his lips and lights up his eyes as he lets his fingers curl around that familiar hand and doesn’t ever want to let go again.  
  
“007.”

  
  
*

  
  
And somehow, it’s not really an end, but rather an entirely new beginning.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] lay them down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/993880) by [MokuK](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MokuK/pseuds/MokuK)




End file.
